Well that was interesting, thank you for the link. I have never seen Tootsie. He is of course right, and I think that this need to be beautiful that he describes makes so many women so very miserable. You can only ever work with what you have. It is a form of brain washing which is so built in to our society that it is difficult to point the finger and say, you - you stop it. It affects men and women, but I would say in my opinion it affects women disproportionately.

I would be very interested to know if, having had his epiphany, he now actively engages with women who are not "beautiful". Has it actually caused him to modify his behaviour and include more of these women in his life?

I would too pira I think that the fact those emotions are still so strong for him 31 years later would indicate that it's certainly had a powerful effect.

mrsjay I will probably be very inarticulate but basically he says that he can't consider Tootsie a comedy because after he was transformed into a woman he wasn't happy about how attractive he was and felt that as an intelligent and interesting person he would have more to physically draw people to him. Through this he realised this is how he's been brainwashed to feel about women and regret how many intelligent and interesting women he has never taken the time to know as they don't fit societal norms of attractiveness. He becomes quite teary when talking about it.

Interesting stuff - from a male point of view - someone who is not attractive or has any kind of status at work, I would feel uncomfortable talking to someone who is considered "beautiful". At school and in life, no one like that has ever approached me or shown any interest in me and I would think there's no point even trying to talk to them as they would not be interested even in a friendship.

It works both ways - but I did find someone who does not consider herself attractive but who I was very much attracted to as a person who I fell in love with. It was not her appearance that attracted me to her but her personality.

It says a huge amount about his own sense of honesty though. He'd obviously seen himself as the liberal, righteous defender of minorities and civil rights that he is. A Good Egg.Then he had that image of himself shattered and instead of blustering, or rationalising it, he looked very clearly at his own assumptions. However distasteful that was for him, or uncomfortable.I'm more impressed with him than before.

I heard an interview on the radio here recently with Dustin Hoffman and it changed my view of him too. He was talking about how he always avoided action movie roles as he never wanted to be required to glamorize gun violence or shoot a gun (apart from a couple of movies where it was a comic thing). He described how he had once been threatened at gunpoint early in his career and how terrifying it was. He said that action films make guns seem trivial and he disagreed with that.